Baekhyun has many questions that he can’t answer. He thinks about them often. Questions that bloom like wild weeds in a field of daisies. Many of them unwanted.

Yet, he couldn’t seem to shake the desire to know. To let himself be seen. Can anyone hear him? The small boy trapped inside his chest, clawing through veins and arteries—ripping a jagged hole in his heart.

He lies in a bed that is too soft. His eyes burn a hole into the dark ceiling. There are no sounds coming from outside. The streets are empty. When he turns his head, he can see a single street light flicker on and off. His eyes are drawn to other houses. They all look the same.

Made with wood and stone as if the goal was to make these million-dollar homes more humble than they were really. It all seemed so pretentious. The low-pitched roofs and wide overhanging eaves—all the same angle and all the more fraudulent. A fake cry of peacefulness. In reality, these houses were home to dysfunctional families who held high-esteemed images.

All the rich girls who liked him because of mere rumors clung to this idea of him like moths attracted to light. Except, he wasn’t light. His heart was constantly weighed down by darkness. So, in all honesty, he embodied pitch black.

He hears a soft moan press to his neck. She kisses him, continuing to . He recalls that the girl on top of him is Lilien Kadlec, the daughter of a senator.

She was like all the others. Pretty smile. Perfect hair. Last year, she flirted with him all throughout English class. He’d forgotten she existed until he met her again at Hendery’s party. And now, she houses him.

Just for a night. Just like the other girls he’s had on and off flings with.

Her kisses were okay. He didn’t like the feeling of her sticky gloss on his skin, but he didn’t care. It was one night, and after that, it was onto the next.

Lilien is clingy. She holds him tightly in their cuddle. She whispers about her broken relationship with her father. She tells him about the nights that she catches her father with another woman.

He finds this ironic, but he doesn’t talk. She’s like everyone else. They talk about themselves, but they never see him. They can’t hear him.

Time and time again, he feels invisible. There are times when he questions if he was really there. When he walks on the rear as his friends laugh about their easy lives. When he sits in the back of the class. When he easily swipes the pack of gum in gas stations.

There was a time when he hadn’t been so promiscuous. So easy about the girls he slept with. When he was fourteen, he really liked the cheer captain.

She was a senior, so theoretically, she was probably an overreach. But he didn’t really mind at the time. After all, it was an innocent crush. She was pretty. She talked to him now and then when their groups intermingled. Then, it was prom season.

Normally, freshmen don’t attend prom. But his friends played a prank on him, leaving a note in her locker signed by him.

She agreed to his surprise. He should’ve been angry at his friends, but he’d gotten a chance with her so why did it matter?

The night was dry. He remembered how stale the air was. It wasn’t cold, but the sky was cloudy, tainted by orange. She took pictures with him, but he remembered just how wrong her hands felt around him.

She held him too close. That night, his friends joked that she was way out of his league and that he was lucky to bag such a girl, but he felt the opposite.

He doubted his feelings.

As the night came to a close, all his friends left with their dates. She drove him back to her place and invited him in. He was reluctant to come in. Their night was fairly innocent to begin with. There were pictures before prom taken by her parents. Pictures during prom taken by the yearbook club. Then, there was dancing. The hotel ballroom was spacious, but the dance floor was overcrowded.

He bumped into her many times, and each apology meant less and less to him.

He didn’t know why he said yes when he did. She tugged him in the doorway—almost impatiently. And as she pulled him into her room, there was turbulence swirling violently in his stomach.

He didn’t get a chance to object when she kissed him. It was his first kiss, and in hindsight, it was probably naive of him to think that it was going to be more than wet sloppiness.

She roughly pushed him down on her bed, impatiently tearing off his clothes. His hands were hesitant. Did he want this? He hadn’t decided fast enough. She'd already undressed.

As she came down on him, he felt suffocated. Her enormous room felt vast and cold. Her giggles were empty, and her kisses nauseating. Finally, he brought his hands up, tightening them over her shoulders to stop her.

“What?” She asked, voice lowering dangerously.

Her tone made him nervous.

“Don’t you want this? You like me, don’t you?”

Her words felt more like a threat than a question. She continued, and he kept his mouth shut.

The next day, he left, feeling ashamed. He couldn’t say a word. Baekhyun had a feeling that if he opened his mouth, he would throw up.

His friends asked how his night went. They bragged about theirs. And when they heard rumors of him sleeping with her, they clasped their hands on his shoulder and cheered him on. In reality, he felt like a fraud.

But he kept his mouth shut.

When he came home, his mother interrogated him about the night before. It wasn’t because she cared. It was more because his disappearance hassled her from getting her drugs. He told her about it as she got high.

And she laughed at him.

Men are animals. It doesn’t matter if the was bad. is .

He felt numb.

Ever since then, that was all he felt.

was merely an exchange of false intimacy. He knew what his place was in the world.

No one heard him.

No one saw him.

So, he it up.

###

He was afraid of the dark. He used to hide under his covers with the rickety old lamp in the middle. His parents had gotten most things from yard sales.

His mother called it borrowing but he knew better. She would bring enormous boxes of junk home. He found old, cracked baseball gloves. Some vintage baseball cards that he sold to feed himself. The best thing that she brought home was books.

They were often books that no one wanted. But he felt a connection with those books. Naive he thought that maybe if he wanted them, someone would return the favor. Anyone. Besides, the books chased the darkness away. When he read, he was in another world. He wasn’t in his minuscule bedroom lying on a shabby bed that gave him rashes.

He was five when he tried to read Odysseus. He couldn’t understand a word, but it didn’t matter. Each time, he picked up the book. He sounded out the words. Some of them sounded silly, but it was fun. It was like a game. He began to understand some of it when his parents picked up the habit of playing the news station on an old radio.

His mother tried to fill the silence when his father was gone.

He reread Odysseus. There were still words he couldn’t understand. So, he sought out the old man above their unit. The old man told him what the big words meant. Each day, he would come back. The man paid him a couple of bucks for the boy to read the book to him.

The little boy became friends with the old man. The old man taught him about other things too. He told him about war. The old man lamented about the deaths of his friends. He lamented about killing innocent children. The old man also told him about the places he went to.

One of them being space. The old man told him that it was like a fever dream. When he looked down on Earth, he wondered if this was what God felt like.

He was fascinated. How could someone travel so far up?

The old man told him that science made it possible.

He dreamed about space. He dreamed about seeing stars above the earth’s atmosphere. He dreamed about seeing the blue oceans. He dreamed about silence. He dreamed about being far away.

He envied Odysseus. The man never made it home to his wife. He wished he could go far away. Anywhere but home.

After the old man died, he lost his source of exploration. He tried to keep memories of the old man in his mind by reading. Soon, he read many things. He read about little boys who went on adventures. He read about boys who saved the world. He read about people falling in love. In books, he saw an inviting world.

So in some ironic way, when Minseok made him work his community service hours at the library, it was a blessing in disguise.

He liked the silence of the space. He liked the smell of old books and the smell of new books. He liked Ms. Soto who would sneak him pieces of granola in secret.

He liked watching Noeul scrunch her face whenever she saw the freshmen horse playing. He liked to watch her silently read in the encyclopedia aisle. It was her way of slacking off, but as she read, her emotions played out on her face like an unexpected painting that found life on a blank canvas.

He saw anger. He saw sadness. And he saw tenderness.

Sometimes, he would slack off with her. He would read beside her, and Noeul was nosy.

“What are you reading?” Noeul asks, peeking at his book.

He wordlessly holds out the cover.

She hums, “do you like it?”

He looks at her blankly to which she would turn back to her book and continue reading.

Then, she would interrupt the silence again. “I really liked it when I read it.” Noeul stares off into the distance, her eyes misting over.

“What was your favorite part?” He asks.

“I liked that Patroclus found himself through his friendship with Achilles,” she murmurs. “But it’s sad, isn’t it? Patroclus loved Achilles so much that he was willing to protect Achilles’s vanity.”

He found himself drawn to her. As he got to know her, he could see the melancholy in her body language. It lingered everywhere, and before he knew it, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

“Have you ever loved anyone?”

Noeul’s smile isn’t real. She tends to smile as if it could erase what she felt inside. he understood her. He never felt that it was pretentious. For, he did the same thing. “I guess I love for all the wrong reasons.”

“What do you mean?”

She gently takes his hand in hers, kissing his knuckle. Her lips are soft. He doesn’t know why she did it, but Noeul never really has a reason behind her actions. Maybe that’s why he liked being around her. She surprised him.“The people I love don’t deserve it.”

“Why?”

Noeul lets go and leans onto the bookcase. But instead of answering his question, she says, “I do wish that Patroclus knew what his limits were.”

“His limits?”

“How far he could go until love destroyed him.”

He contemplates this. “In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

Noeul’s eyes widen, and his lip twitches ever so slightly. Her surprise is short, and she settles with a reluctant smile. “You’ve read it,” she mutters offhandedly. He could tell she was a little embarrassed. He appreciates the ambiguity. They talk without really talking.

“Did Achilles deserve love?”

“Everyone deserves love,” Noeul answers, “but I think life chips away at people as they age. Achilles was a boy, and then, he suddenly wasn’t. It’s beautiful that Patroclus loved him despite what’s become of him.”

“Even in death?”

She anchors her attention on him. “Some people are worth loving. Don’t you think?”

He snorts. “That can be argued.”

Noeul doesn’t divert her gaze. “You’re worth loving. Anyone who’s told you otherwise is wrong.”

He stares at her, blinking rapidly. His heart pounds.

“I wouldn’t care if loving you destroyed me.”

And for the first time in the world, he feels somewhat seen. Because it didn’t matter if no one in the world heard him. She could see him struggling to float. She could hear all of the words he wanted to say.

I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

Maybe she was his Patroclus.